Allen: Dialogue should be about more than guns

Tuesday

Mar 6, 2018 at 2:00 AM

Guns' availability isn't what led to the recent school massacre.

I don’t share the same slavish devotion to the Second Amendment as some of my fellow conservatives.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why the average gun owner would ever have need of a bump stock. Like many card-carrying NRA members, I would argue that requiring background checks for all gun sales hardly seems like trampling the Constitution.

I can appreciate why the latest proposal to arm teachers seems ludicrous to many. And I’m receptive to reasonable arguments that favor age restrictions on purchasing certain kinds of guns.

But in the aftermath of the latest school shooting — latest being a devastating but pertinent qualifier — it seems that, contrary to the current prevailing narrative, the availability of guns, while an enabling factor, isn’t what led to the massacre of 17 people in a Florida high school two weeks ago.

Yes, the ubiquity of guns in America, particularly military-style semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, is troubling, if only because it raises the question of why owning one is necessary. But gun rights advocates are correct in asserting that the proliferation of guns has not led to more gun deaths. Indeed, gun sales and ownership have soared in recent years, but the gun homicide rate has plummeted.

Still, as gun homicides have declined, mass shootings, and school shootings in particular, have become disturbingly frequent. The reason is not clear. That should compel anyone sincerely interested in understanding the underlying causes of this phenomenon to consider what other factors might be at play.

I don’t have a coherent thesis as to what exactly is motivating primarily young white males to unleash hell on their classmates. I expect there is a litany of interlocking factors. I’ve come across a few worthy of further exploration.

The first seems obvious and uncontroversial: Today’s youths are increasingly detached and anti-social. They consume massive amounts of media, often violent, without parental guidance or mitigating moral guardrails.

They also spend a disturbing amount of time consumed by social media, making them ever more disengaged and susceptible to the negative social effects of the digital world — from bullying to depression to violence.

This social estrangement is compounded by another factor described by Stella Morabito in The Federalist. She argues that our “alienating mass schooling bureaucracy” is too centralized and politicized, and breeds aggression and disaffection.

The U.S. population has almost tripled in the past 90 years, she explains, but the number of public schools has decreased by more than half, packing adolescents into factory-style leviathans where kids become faceless statistics.

While some of her arguments warrant further evidence, her point is that smaller schools with more engaged communities would be better equipped to prevent the “emotional malaise that fuels a sense of confusion and detachment” in many of today’s high schoolers — especially those who become violent.

While institutional failure seems a likely factor — it certainly was in Parkland on many levels — others argue that teenage disengagement is the product of our decaying social structure. Some critics mock the suggestion that proliferation of single-parent households could have anything to do with mass shootings, but writers Suzanne Venker and Peter Hasson convincingly make the case that fatherlessness has a role to play in boys turning violent.

Hasson explains that “conversations about black-on-black violence often raise the link between broken households (or fatherless homes) and juvenile delinquency. But when the conversation turns to mass shootings, we seem to forget that link altogether.”

That doesn’t mean mass shooters can’t come from happy two-parent homes, but most don’t, and that relationship shouldn’t be ignored.

The problem with any of these theories is that they require society to reflect on problems and deficiencies that lack simple solutions.

Increasing some gun restrictions feels like the answer in the wake of preventable tragedy. It should be on the table, but only if it’s part of a holistic approach that acknowledges the many cultural problems that led to Parkland and nearly every mass shooting that preceded it.

Cynthia Allen is a columnist with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Reach her email at cmallen@star-telegram.com. Her column is distributed by Tribune News Service.

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